Stuff White People Like

“How do artificial preservatives & additives have anything to do with such varied, hereditary medical conditions such as ADHD and fibromyalgia?

Most people are just ignorant of the basic chemistry of food and automatically think artificial = bad”

Wrong. You need to read up a little more on the current state of food science and agriculture (a good source for this – most particularly because it cites particular studies in its footnotes on the page where each study is mentioned, making it a lot easier to verify – appears to be the book “In Defense of Food”, which I found at my local library so you should be able to find it at your local branch as well if you don’t want to shell out money for it).

Basically, modern industrial farming practices (read: those that became popular after the industrial revolution and more so after World War II) have royally screwed up the nutritional qualities of what produce we do eat whole, and refining processes generally rob the majority of what’s in our diet of the majority of its natural nutrients – not to mention the evidence that “fortifying” processed foods (like white rice or whatever, let alone snack cakes) isn’t nearly as nutritionally effective as eating say, carrots or apples which haven’t undergone much processing beyond cooking.

Why? Probably because the body was never meant to actually absorb nutrients that way, but rather, it evolved (or was created, whatever) to make use of everything out of a natural fruit or veggie or meat that it can – the processes it uses to digest and absorb food are remarkably versatile (diets that peoples have historically thrived on range from the sort-of-vegan to the fish-and-rice-based and even an all-meat-milk-and-blood diet)… but those processes simply aren’t meant for a diet that’s in fact primarily composed of heavily-processed (and nutritionally vapid) wheat, soy and corn syrup, which are all refined to and tinkered with to the point of losing most of their natural nutritional value, and yet happen to be the bases for most of today’s highly processed or refined foods. In fact, we’re constantly discovering new nutritional components (vitamins, essential oils, antioxidents, all of them relatively recent discoveries, and all of those discoveries still constantly being added to with more knowledge of their functions and almost worryingly complex interactions) … so there’s almost no telling what we’re nutritionally robbing ourselves of by basing our diet off of processed foods.

Refined foods such as white flour and white rice last longer and often are preferred for their color and taste – the problem being that refining it to the point of turning it bleached white actually takes the vast majority of the nutritional value out; sadly, the lack of nutritional value in fact makes it less vulnerable to microbes and other pests that like to eat our food, which is why it lasts longer in the first place.

On top of this, the focus on “high yield” plants has moved us away from “high nutrition” plants; increased use of chemical pesticides means plants produce smaller amounts of highly beneficial things like antioxidents and phytochemicals (both anti-cancer agents, with at least one also connected to reducing inflammation, meaning it aids against not just cancer but also things like arthritis), since they don’t have to struggle to thrive; and the commonly-used NPK fertilizers are the plant equivalent of fast food – they don’t provide a number of key nutrients that are usually gained from the soil, and they also decrease the average lengths of root systems (meaning plants don’t expose themselves to a number of beneficial things that include deeper stores of vitamins and minerals, like they normally would), while depleting the upper levels of soil.

Organic farming is often derided as being supposedly inefficient, since it takes longer and requires a lot more work to maintain and produces food product that often spoils quicker; yet the sad fact is that since the post-World War II era, many industrially-raised fruits and veggies have been shown time and again as having gradually decreased in key nutrient levels (such as those of vitamins A and D, for instance) across the board, in some cases as much as 28% in only a couple decades. An apple a day may have kept the doctor away during the Cold War, but now it takes at least three to get that same amount of nutrition!

Ask yourself: would I rather have food that lasts a long time but screws up my body through a bizarre combination of overfeeding and under-nutrition and too many sugars of the type that my body isn’t well-equipped to process efficiently… or a smaller amount of food that needs to be eaten sooner, but that will be more nutritious, better-processed by my body, and probably more satiating because I won’t need to eat as much to get what I need from my diet?

A lot of people make a fuss about how supposedly, organic is OMG BETTER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT… the truth is that regardless of any effect on the environment, it’s demonstrably better for your physical health to eat “whole foods” (but not necessarily from the oft-overpriced Whole Foods, which is a whole different kettle ‘a fish), and even better when some of those – particularly plants – are what we label “organic”. Granted, I don’t think that antibiotics should be outlawed in meat production – it’s been demonstrated that simple food contagions like listeria are already more common in meat from animals that never had antibiotics – but we really don’t know what effect certain hormones may have on the end properties of the meat, and if absolutely nothing else, it’s sure as hell better to eat meat that’s been fed off fresh grass (“free range”) than dried-out hay or industrial byproducts (not free range), since the animal itself would have had better nutrition, thus passing better nutrition up the food chain to those of us who eat it.

I don’t know about you, but if it means avoiding or alleviating all that heart disease, arthritis, cancer and late-life diabetes that so much of my family seems to be getting in the last few years on the “Western diet” (as the predominantly processed/refined diet has been known since it became prominent), I’d rather just stop eating so many cupcakes and pop tarts, and stick to the fruits, veggies, dairy, eggs and meat and whole grains that my family might have eaten and thrived on a couple hundred years ago – hopefully organic or free range, when it’s affordable, but really… anything but making processed crap the center of my diet.

In fact, I’ve actually been trying it off and on for a couple weeks, and come to the startling conclusion that I feel better when I am not eating Hostess cupcakes and fast food and even cereal bars every single day, multiple times a day… even though it’s actually as cheap or cheaper to eat in-season fruit or veggies for breakfast or snack in their place. And this comes from an avowed chocoholic with natural sweet tooth.

So yeah… while I don’t think white rice or cupcakes or chocolate will completely vanish from my diet, I don’t think adding a lot more whole foods in place of the more processed and refined foods is a bad idea, considering I feel better after a matter of DAYS, let alone the science to back up their better nutritional value.

I work at whole foods in CO. Lowest entry position starts at $9

Yeah I definitely have to agree with you. I was looking at the whole foods website when I found this blog and they don’t have any growers in Florida but have several stores here.
farmers market and flea markets are the way to go and sooooo much cheaper.

Here in CO the whole foods I work at gets some outrageously large amount of produce from local farmers…where is your logic? It would be impossible to transport organic produce across the country. Might want to check on USDA organic standards.